All of My Children Are Not Home Safe
An email from my daughter’s school arrived in my inbox at 1:19 pm on October 1st that took my breath away. It was an unsigned announcement notifying parents that, due to severe budget cuts, all students in the district must resume in-person classes on November 9th.
This contradicted what we’d been told (repeatedly) since September. Namely, that her high school would remain completely virtual for the entirety of the 2020–2021 school year.
I’d tried to process the information without panicking and, after reading the email several times, found a link at the very bottom that read, simply, “Remote Instruction Continuation.” Aside from this link, the email didn’t mention the option of continuing remote instruction, nor did her school’s principal in his weekly video address.
But the link was there and so I clicked on it. It lead to a form that parents could fill out if they didn’t want their child to return to in-person learning. The district obviously wanted parents to consider this option as a last resort. A sentence above the form read:
“Families that meet the criteria to keep their child out of school because they are considered to be in a high-risk category and more susceptible to contracting Coronavirus will be eligible, upon request, to remain on full remote instruction.”
I thought about what it would mean if my 16-year-old daughter got COVID-19. She would probably be okay, but maybe not. I imagined her coming home sick, trying to stay isolated, and ultimately passing the virus to me or my husband (or, more likely, both of us).
Based on our age and weight and blood pressure, we’re both in the high-risk category. We’re likely to get extremely sick. Though…maybe not.
Then I thought about something my daughter had said back in March, when New York was hit so hard that her school shut down in the middle of the month and didn’t reopen again.
I can’t lose anybody else.
I filled out the form.
We lost my older daughter, Ana, three years and six months ago. She died from a rare form of pediatric cancer called Inflammatory Myofibroblastic Tumor.
